Banner Saga 2

Game key provided for free by developer

Although Banner Saga 2 may not bring much new in the gameplay front, a deeper and darker narrative for the series second entry is still a great game. Small additions flesh out parts of the experience and prepare players for an explosive finale. 

We join our heroes right after the first game with the ability to load in a previous save or completely change the final decision from the first game. I highly recommend importing a previous save file as I feel that will give your journey the most authentic feel. Having just come off the first game the constant tutorials of things I had plenty of experience with, got a bit tiresome in the beginning, though I do understand it's to help players jumping into the series at this entry. The reintroduction to characters with small blurbs about who they are and what their story is helped jog my terrible memory and were nice, though.

It was a bit odd starting off this game with an uplifting feeling. Caravan morale started high and my clansman, a new type of follower, were foraging lots of supplies...but as expected things got tough in the late game. Let's start talking about the new entries with the clansman. In addition to your fighters and Varl from the previous game, clansman are units that can't fight, but instead forage for supplies. This leads to a balance of fighters for battles ahead and clansmen for keeping up supplies to keep the caravan going. A small addition but a nice wrinkle to the formula.

A feature with said clansmen is the ability to turn them into fighters in the training tent. I didn't feel the need to do this more than the time they introduce the mechanic as I prefer a play style where I stock up on supplies and let my heroes fight in wars. The training tent is a much more fulfilling area this time around. Not only can you convert clansmen to fighter but you can also partake in challenges for your heroes which yield rewards. Having the tent be just a place to try out new fighters before, this small addition is a welcome sign for players wanting to test their skill that much more. 

Speaking of fighting, arenas are no longer plain squares or rectangles. The areas are more varied with gaps in terrain and obstacles to protect weaker units. There is also the occasional hazard such as fire that you have to avoid. Along with new terrain comes new objectives for winning. Previously, the goal was to kill all the enemy units and victory would be yours. Things are shaken up this time by having objectives such as clearing snow from a path to escape or killing a certain unit, making the rest flee. This was a welcome addition as it gives you the option to either rush a certain unit with your big guns or focus on fighting as less as possible. 

I felt a stronger connection to the story this time. Where the first game introduced you to the world, this game hits you with a dark and dire story. You learn more about the characters and their motives, as well as learning more about the foes that chase you. At one point in the game your map shows a large blackness showing the destruction that has become of the lands behind you. The darkness always feels closer then it looks. The bombastic soundtrack and eerie noises as you see the world being engulfed on the horizon is a horrifying sight. The terrifying dreams the secondary character, Bolverk experiences during the story hint at a larger role for him and his connections to...well, I'm not going to spoil it.

Banner Saga 2 is an absolute gem of a sequel and second act. The final scenes get you pumped for the finale where all the choices you've made so far will come to a conclusion. I have no doubt Banner Saga 3 will close the story on a strong note...I'm just a bit worried this story won't have a happy ending.

The Banner Saga

Game key provided for free by developer

Never before has a game filled me with so much dread and stress and still become one of the games I've had the funnest time with. The Banner Saga always makes you second guess yourself and ask if you're making the right choice. Something you feel may be best in the short term can come back to bite you and greatly impact your chance of survival. In a beautifully crafted world filled with sweeping vistas, large mountains, and interesting scenarios, you never know what is coming next or how you'll make it through.

From the moment the game begins you see a large caravan treading through a snowy landscape. Some of the first words you hear are "the gods are dead". The sense of uneasiness begins. As you enter your first town you find a coup of sorts taking place. You step in and learn of a larger threat coming from the north, the Dredge, a race of hulking monstrosities with no other mission in life then to destroy everything that stands in their path. As you leave the town you are tasked with escorting the human price to the Varl capital to form an alliance between human and Varl (a giant like race) kind. 

 

The story switches to a couple of heroes to the east. (In the first few chapters you follow two groups but eventually become one large caravan). A father, Rook and his daughter, Alette who are seen hiding from a pack of Dredge. Here you learn more about the turn based combat system. Every single attack in this game feels impactful. Each unit has an armor and stamina meter leading to more strategic battles. Should you break away armor on an enemy you'll be able to do more stamina damage to them. Stamina acts as both your health and how much damage you do. I found it fun in the later game to send my tankier units to the front line and smash away large chucks of stamina while my ranger characters sat in the back lines almost able to wipe out entire armor bars by themselves. 

After battles, you are rewarded with renown. This is used as to both promote your units and improve their stats and used as currency to purchase supplies. Supplies are essential on your trek across the world to escape from the Dredge as your caravan grows. During my time with the game and especially in the later parts I was constantly balancing whether I wanted a chance to keep my caravan well or keep my warriors up to snuff with their opponents. 

My absolute favorite part about this game is the constant need to make choices, even though I never feel like I made the right one. As I type this I still feel like I made the wrong final choice, though both options were impossible to feel 100% great about. Along your journey from town to town there could be four or five small choices that will affect you. These could be a decision of what to do with a troublemaker in the caravan or which path to take at a fork in the road. One example that really sticks out to me was when a cart full of supplies was hanging over a cliff that was being held back by one of my characters and a dredge. Without specifics of what I did, the cart ended up falling to the bottom of the cliff. I decided to leave the cart be as I felt hanging around the situation could be dangerous. After a few minutes had gone by I got word that someone in my caravan had been sending people back to recover the supplies lost from the cart. Had I made that choice at the time who knows what would have happened both then, and later down the road. 

When you make a choice or something outside of your control happens to the caravan your morale stat either declines or improves. After every in game day it decreases, along with some supplies. I found myself just barely scraping by with normal morale and supplies towards the last few towns. Morale effects your will in battle, used to give your characters either more movement or extra attack power. It was more than a meter for me though. After every time I saw "morale declined" when making a choice it made me worry more about the next choice I would have to make and how it was going to affect those that have put their trust in me to lead them away from impending doom. 

One of the best parts about The Banner Saga is that it's just the first part of a trilogy. A game has never stressed me out more but I cannot wait to experience the rest of what this world has to show me. A beautiful world, with characters you care about, and a fantastic combat system lead to a game I could not put down. Those not fans of tactical turn based games should look past that just to experience a gripping narrative filled with impactful choices. I look forward to diving into The Banner Saga 2 right away so that when the finale of the trilogy releases next month I'll be all caught up and see how my choices impact the final story. The Banner Saga is an absolute masterpiece. 

SteamWorld Dig 2

And now for an extremely biased write up about a game I’ve been looking forward to for awhile. When I went to PAX East earlier this year I met Julius Goldberg who is the Community Manager  at Image & Form. Him and I had a 5-10 minute long conversation about games, life, and everything else. He was the nicest person I’ve ever met and left a last impact on me. When I got up to the booth to actually play the game I met Marco Podda, Publishing & Project Manager, who saw me waiting in line for awhile and asked me if I was ready to play. I had told him about watching others before me and demo footage of the level I was about to play and of my past history with the SteamWorld series of games and how excited I was to finally get to play the game with my own two hands. While standing in line and talking to Julius I was able to get my Indiebox copy of the first SteamWorld dig signed by the two gentlemen. If you two guys ever read this I’d like to thank you for your kindness and care, the world needs more people like you. Now that we having my gushing out of the way let’s talk about the game and if it lived up to my lofty expectations.

SteamWorld Dig 2 takes places after the first game where that game’s hero Rusty goes missing at the end. We pick up the story with Dorothy, a young steambot on a mission to find her friend Rusty. The gameplay loop is the same for the most part wherein you dig through mines collecting gems, going back up to town, selling your gems, then using your cash to purchase upgrades so you can stay in mines longer and stay safer down there. What really excited me was the new upgrade cog system for your tools. Along with many other secrets to be found in the game you can find cogs that can be added up and put into slots to give you bonuses such as a larger light radius, quicker pickaxe swings, and lots of other cool things. I’m not one to go out of my way to find secrets or 100% complete a game but I can absolutely see myself going back through and picking up things I had missed.

If I had to give one criticism it would be that the story beats felt the exact same as the last game. The last game was rather short and in the end it boils down to having to find 3 things in previous areas and destroying them. In this game the situation ends up being the same but the game is longer this time which is great. The game is also a metroidvania in a sense and not having played many of those types of games personally, I’m not sure if this is just a staple of the genre such as grinding in a JRPG or quick time events in a first person shooter. Having a sense of exploration and addictive loop made me look past the shortcomings of the story since a game like this I’m going to play for the gameplay anyways and not look for a long, tedious story.

SteamWorld Dig 2 was an absolute blast to play. I felt like every time I would tell myself “just one more time into the mines” I would end up playing for another 30 minutes and 10 more trips. Being on the Switch it was nice to be able to give myself more time to really explore every corner of the game world and see what I could find if I just went a little deeper. I’d like to thank Image & Form for making such a fun game to play and explore in.

Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle

On a slow day at work while I was watching the Ubisoft E3 conference and Mario+Rabbis Kingdom Battle was revealed so I sent out a hilarious tweet that “Nobody wants this #UbiE3”. Jesus Christ, Mike give stuff a chance. Moments after when Shigeru Miyamoto walked out on stage, the god damn creator of Mario, to give the rest of a kind of silent “this is going to be good” feeling I shut my Twitter app and watched the rest of the gameplay. Minutes after that I opened my Twitter app again and tweeted “I’m going to get this game aren’t I?”.

Kingdom Battle was the game none of us thought we wanted but ended up coming to grips with and from what I’ve seen have universally loved. While I’m not a huge fan of tactics games (I’m not one to think actions through before I do them) I loved the flow and gameplay of Kingdom Battle. I was able to slow myself down and tell myself, yes, you could do this one thing but if you do this first and then that, this you can clear the whole field of bad guys. I’m looking forward to delving into more strategy games soon and maybe I’ll learn to enjoy them more than I ever had. Sometimes you just need to slow down and take things one thought at a time.

The main thing that I think a lot of people were skeptical when the game was first leaked before official reveal was the addition of Ubisoft’s Rabbids characters. These guys were the minions before the minions and by golly do I loathe me some minions. Turns out, I was wrong again because every little noise these bastards made and stupids actions they did gave me a hearty chuckle more often than not. The world was fantastic as well blending the well known Mushroom Kingdom with the crazy antics of the Rabbids and made me want to explore beyond the linear walkways we were given..

In the end I was wrong (shocking). Don’t judge things before you see what they truly are. What I thought would be a stupid crossover that would maybe hit the low 70s on Metacritic because I didn't think two franchises could fit together ended up being one of my favorite games of the year. The difficulty did spike for me at the end but luckily there was an easy mode and for someone who doesn’t have time to waste on games that waste my time that thing was an amazing addition. I do hope the team behind this team gets another shot with the Mario IP because I’d love to see what they can do next. I’ve never played Super Mario RPG on the SNES so...maybe a remake would be cool?

Kamiko

When was the last time $5 got you something worthwhile that you felt was worth the price of entry? It certainly wasn’t that cheeseburger you had earlier or that super mocha frappuccino latte...thing. For $5 there was a game recently released on the Nintendo Switch called Kamiko. To be honest it’ll probably take me more time to write this review then it did to complete one of the four stages the games presents to you. Although short, I haven’t felt better about dropping a few bucks on something that gives me a short burst of fun and a surprisingly good time.

Kamiko is an action RPG with simple gameplay and a puzzle to solve here and there. You choose from one of three characters, more on those later, and go through four stages unlocking gates that have been sealed by demons. There isn’t an extremely deep plot with twists and turns but that’s to be expected in a game that took me 53 minutes and 9 seconds to complete with some minor head scratching on which way I needed to go next. You kill hordes of enemies to build up a combo meter and fill a gauge that allows you to unlock doors, open chests, and use special moves. Once you’ve broken the seals on the four gates throughout each level you’re then taken to the stage boss which usually goes as any video game boss usually does. Find the pattern of attacks then strike when your moment arrives, repeat three times, badaboom onto the next stage. After you’re done the campaign with one character you have two more characters to choose from, both with varying attack styles of the one you just played. The campaign is the same but it’s the different play styles that is supposed to bring you back for another play through.

One of the things I look for most in a game is style. Pixel art is among my favorites and Kamiko delivers on that. Along with a sweet soundtrack, that the developer has noted interest in releasing, it was a joy to play with a smooth framerate and having the music blast through my speakers both on the tv and in handheld mode. Enemy types are few and far between but with them being killed in less then a second with one or two attack swipes they’ll probably be the thing you pay the least attention to. Each of the four stages has a different environment and I was excited at the end of each to see what the next would look like.  

For such a cheap entry price I feel Kamiko is absolutely worth what it asks of the player for the amount of fun you’ll have. The game with undoubtedly be played by speedrunners as the game times you on each stage and overall but is perfect for pick up and play especially if you have 10 or 15 minutes before your bus arrives. The game is perfect on the Switch and I look forward to what the studio does in the future.

Owlboy review

Owlboy is a game that was in development for almost 10 years and I hadn’t heard a thing about it until earlier this year. I saw rejoice on the internet the the game would finally be coming out. I looked for more info about this game that was sure to be a hot item and found a video showing a trailer of the game. Immediately I was taken away by the amazing pixel art graphics and music. The game was now on my radar and November 1st couldn’t come soon enough. I eventually ended up ordering a physical copy of the game through Indiebox and knew I’d have to wait a bit for my copy. Reviews came pouring in on release day to an overwhelming amount of praise. When I finally got my copy a little more than a month later, it being a physical one, I jumped in immediately. Was all the praise for the game genuine? Was the game worth such a long development time? Well...

As I loaded the game up I was greeted with the amazing art style and music but there was more this time, a story. Otus is a mute whose mentor, Asio, is kind of a dick. Actually, he’s a real dick to Otus. Nothing is ever good enough for him and you can see the emotion on Otus’ face when he lets his mentor down. I had a genuine frown on my face when Otus did and felt connected to him as I have in the past when I feel I let people down. The emotion of the game is a key component whether it’s happiness, sadness, or humor..looking at you, Boguins. The ending...oh man the ending. I haven’t felt that impacted by a video game ending for quite some time and the journey was well worth it.

While I didn’t track how long I played for I would say the game lasted 7-10 hours which is perfect length especially instead of the 40 hour long RPGs I’ve been playing this year. The levels are fun, combat flows well, and the difficulty was just right. The visuals made the dungeons feel alive and each enemy was unique. There are puzzles but they weren’t challenging, again, perfect for me. You’re able to freely fly anywhere in the game except for the last part of the game due to...circumstances, and luckily the game still holds up.

Overall, I’m in love with Owlboy. I haven’t stopped thinking about it and looking for more fanart since I stopped playing. I’m listening to the soundtrack as I write this and it brings back great memories. Owlboy is a feelgood game that can whisk you away to another world whenever the real one gets to be too much for you. I highly recommend it to anyone.

Where it all started

Originally written 7/12/15

News came out today that Saturo Iwata, the President of Nintendo, had passed away. It was really yesterday but it was a private thing for awhile. I guess maybe it’s time to buy a WiiU. Maybe trade in my Vita towards it, sort of a one dying system for another type trade.

I don’t need a new console. I don’t need any of my consoles. I am a gamer though and I owe it to Nintendo because they were the ones that started it all for me. I would go to my friend Matt’s house after school in first grade and he had a Nintendo Entertainment System , or NES, for short.  I have so many memories with that big gray box from the games we played to having to blow in the cartridge almost every time you put a new one in because that’s just how games were back then, kids.

Mario Bros was the very first video game I saw, like many people my age at the time. There I learned don’t jump under the first block because the Goomba will get you. Or, having to run and jump to get to that far away ledge. I still play that game no  and it’s one that will always hold up.

A teal Gameboy with Pokemon Yellow and Super Mario and the 6 coins were a couple presents for my tenth(?) birthday. It took me months to figure out how to even leave my room in Pokemon and I remember freaking out after I finally walked on the stairs to go to the next room only to go right back up and scrambling to do what I had just done again. To this day Yellow version always holds a place in my heart and when it was released on the 3ds all the sounds and sprites took me back to those days when things were just simpler.

I got a Gamecube as my first home console as growing up with a single mother I wasn’t handed anything and always had to treat my stuff with care because if it broke I sure as hell wasn’t getting another one anytime soon. I’m glad that was the case though because it makes me care so much more about things knowing that if something happens it would be my fault and my responsibility to get a new one if it really meant that much to me.

I look back on my past a lot, probably more than I should, but one thing is constant and that’s video games. Nintendo started that for me and so many others and I don’t think a lot of people that play games would be who they are if it weren’t for Nintendo in one form or another. Maybe it’s time to go relive those memories and dive into the virtual console of the WiiU that has all my childhood games and more. I’ve made plenty of dumb purchases in my time but mayb this would be a good one.

Rest in peace Mr. Iwata. Thank you.